Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus - Is This Possible?

[Camacha]

I guess a have a hard time seeing Apatosaurus or Triceratops as ever being related to a bird like creature, but maybe I'm being too superficial.

Can you seen them being related to bipedal dinosaurs?

[Kryten]

I guess a have a hard time seeing Apatosaurus or Triceratops as ever being related to a bird like creature, but maybe I'm being too superficial.

Triceratops probably had bristles. That help?

[Tommygun]

Can you seen them being related to bipedal dinosaurs?

Even most of the bipedal ones usually don't look right at the hips.

But after looking into it, I didn't realized that modern birds evolved from the Saurischians (lizard-hipped) dinosaurs and not the ornithischians (bird-hipped) ones. Weird independent evolutions.

Triceratops probably had bristles. That help?

I grew up with naked dinosaurs, imagining a Triceratops as a porcupine or T-Rex as a giant Jurassic chicken is too much for me.

[KerikBalm]

Look at those utterly minuscule legs, could they have been able to have supported this behemoth? If not, those arms wouldn't have helped. The hands aren't structured for it. Would its centre of gravity of been correct for bipedal walking? It had a long neck, long body and very long tail.

Length of the legs does not correlate with how much weight they can bear, that would be the thickness of them.

As for the CG, well, it would mainly be the foot lenght that determines how well it balances when standing still, but a larger stride (longer legs) would help its dynamic balance when moving. The shorter CG would held its side-to-side balance.

It also presents ground clearance problems, if you're going to be that low, quadrupedal is better

But if you stay mostly in shallow water, stumpy legs are better.

Crocodiles, alligators, and gharials existed since long before the Cretacious. It is more likely that spinosaurids (spinosaurus, Baryonix, and Suchomimus, among others) evolved from a common ancestor with crocs.

Eushuchia evolved during the Cretaceous, not long before it. There were crocodylomorphs before the Cretaceous, including the one I linked above, and the phytosaurs, which looked very much like real crocodiles, (except they had their nostrils at the top of their skull, like a dolphin, not at the tip of their snout). -They died out, and later their "cousins" diversified and took their place.

Spinosaurus no more has a common ancestor with Crocodiles than Iguanadon or Triceratops, or T-rex does.

Dinosaurs and birds are very closely related (like siblings)

Birds are a subset of dinosaurs

Yeah, I should have thought that last point through a bit better. Perhaps Spinosaurids developed into the varieties of fish eating birds we have today.

Nope, Spinosaurus was quite far from maniraptora, there's no chance. Spinosaurus has no living descendants

I'm more interested in the findings of the Dmanisi human skull (Skull 5), found in the Republic of Georgia, which is showing that all early Homo species were one...

It doesn't conclusively show that, but its a reasonable interpretation

and that such 'men' existed over 1.5 million years ago,

This was already well known.

putting early man (essentially) out there among late dinosaurs in the early Pleistocene period...

This is ridiculous if you mean dinosaurs in the traditional (non-avian) sense. If you mean to include birds, then the statement is still ridiculous because of how pointless and obvious it is.

and turns the 'out of Africa' theory on its head.

It does no such thing.

If white was what was found, how can they possibly know what the front legs looked like, unless they also found imprints? Or are they extrapolating from other finds?

Those weren't the only specimens. Also there is a lot of extrapolation from related species. If we found an ape skull, but no hands, we could safely reconstruct the hands to have 5 fingers and opposable thumbs. We could also probably extrapolate that the feet were similar... but as we know with humans, that may be a bad assumption, although one that really only gets questioned when looking at the human line, trying to determine when our lineage became bipedal.

Does anyone know how closely related are the two legged avian dinosaurs with the four legged ones.

I'm mean was the split hundreds of millions of years apart?

The oldest dinosaurs and immediate ancestors and cousins of dinosaurs were bipedal, but going back a little further yields creatures that could walk both ways.

At any rate, the first dinosaur group branched into the ornithischians , and the Saurischia

The earliest Saurischia looks rather like therapods, but they split into the therapods (which are basically all bipedal), and the sauropods. The early sauropods could walk on 4 legs or just two, and the later sauropods were all quadrupeds, and much much heavier.

The ornithischia likewise have both two legged and 4 legged forms, although a great many could walk both ways.

Thus there isn't really any connection between whether a dino walked on 2 legs or 4 legs, and its relationship with birds.

[MightyDarkStar]

Something to cheer you up.

"DUE TO THE CONFUSING PROPORTIONS, THIS IS THE LATEST PROPOSED LOCOMOTION METHOD"

Edited January 14, 2015 by MightyDarkStar

[LordFerret]

Not really. It modifies the "out of Africa" migration for early hominids esp. Homo erectus, but I don't see how this affects it for Homo sapiens, ~1.3 million years later. There are several different migration events involved but only one really involves 'modern' humans.

There were already people who thought a lot of the other stuff should be lumped into Homo erectus so I don't think this is game changing. (Generally early hominid related discoveries get announced as "this changes everything!!!!!" but that doesn't necessarily mean much.)

IMO early hominids are massively over-split anyway because everyone wants to discover a new one (At least the genera are.)

The release of this *news* is still a bit early, but I hear and understand what you're saying. It does have potential to change a big part of the picture however - maybe. I'm sure we'll have to wait a few more years before final evidence and conclusions are drawn. They are not finished with the dig in Dmanisi. I know at this point anyway, that the current out of Africa scenario matches the split and diversity of the ASPM allele, both of which happened about 50,000? years ago. I've many friends in Georgia who are watching this, so I'm expecting future updates on the dig.

[NERVAfan]

I know at this point anyway, that the current out of Africa scenario matches the split and diversity of the ASPM allele, both of which happened about 50,000? years ago.

Sure, but that's not going to be affected by digging up of fossils over 1 million years old. Whether you think ergaster, erectus etc. are all one species or not, it's still a separate 'out of Africa' migration event from the sapiens one.